The war in Afghanistan -- where the enemy is elusive and rarely
seen, where the cultural and linguistic disconnect makes every trip
outside the wire a visit to hostile territory, where it is clear that
you are losing despite the vast industrial killing machine at your
disposal -- feeds the culture of atrocity. The fear and stress, the anger
and hatred, reduce all Afghans to the enemy, and this includes women,
children and the elderly. Civilians and combatants merge into one
detested nameless, faceless mass. The psychological leap to murder is
short. And murder happens every day in Afghanistan. It happens in drone
strikes, artillery bombardments, airstrikes, missile attacks and the
withering suppressing fire unleashed in villages from belt-fed machine
guns.

Military attacks like these in civilian areas make discussions of human rights an absurdity. Robert Bales,
a U.S. Army staff sergeant who allegedly killed 16 civilians in two
Afghan villages, including nine children, is not an anomaly. To decry
the butchery of this case and to defend the wars of occupation we wage
is to know nothing about combat. We kill children nearly every day in
Afghanistan. We do not usually kill them outside the structure of a
military unit. If an American soldier had killed or wounded scores of
civilians after the ignition of an improvised explosive device against
his convoy, it would not have made the news. Units do not stick around
to count their "collateral damage." But the Afghans know. They hate us
for the murderous rampages. They hate us for our hypocrisy.

The scale of our state-sponsored murder is masked from public view.
Reporters who travel with military units and become psychologically part
of the team spin out what the public and their military handlers want,
mythic tales of heroism and valor. War is seen only through the lens of
the occupiers. It is defended as a national virtue. This myth allows us
to make sense of mayhem and death. It justifies what is usually nothing
more than gross human cruelty, brutality and stupidity. It allows us to
believe we have achieved our place in human society because of a long
chain of heroic endeavors, rather than accept the sad reality that we
stumble along a dimly lit corridor of disasters. It disguises our
powerlessness. It hides from view the impotence and ordinariness of our
leaders. But in turning history into myth we transform random events
into a sequence of events directed by a will greater than our own, one
that is determined and preordained. We are elevated above the multitude.
We march to nobility. But it is a lie. And it is a lie that combat
veterans carry within them. It is why so many commit suicide.

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"I, too, belong to this species," J. Glenn Gray
wrote of his experience in World War II. "I am ashamed not only of my
own deeds, not only of my nation's deeds, but of human deeds as well. I
am ashamed to be a man."

When Ernie Pyle, the famous World War II correspondent, was killed on
the Pacific island of Ie Shima in 1945, a rough draft of a column was
found on his body. He was preparing it for release upon the end of the
war in Europe. He had done much to promote the myth of the warrior and
the nobility of soldiering, but by the end he seemed to have tired of it
all:

"But there are many of the living who have burned into
their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over
the hillsides and in the ditches along the high rows of hedge
throughout the world.

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"Dead men by mass production -- in one country after another -- month after
month and year after year.

"Dead men in winter and dead men in summer.

"Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous.

"Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them.

"These are the things that you at home need not even try to
understand. To you at home they are columns of figures, or he is a near
one who went away and just didn't come back. You didn't see him lying so
grotesque and pasty beside the gravel road in France.

"We saw him, saw him by the multiple thousands. That's the difference."

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There is a constant search in all wars to find new perversities, new
forms of death when the initial flush fades, a rear-guard and finally
futile effort to ward off the boredom of routine death. This is why
during the war in El Salvador the death squads and soldiers would cut
off the genitals of those they killed and stuff them in the mouths of
the corpses. This is why we reporters in Bosnia would find bodies
crucified on the sides of barns or decapitated. This is why U.S. Marines
have urinated
on dead Taliban fighters. Those slain in combat are treated as trophies
by their killers, turned into grotesque pieces of performance art. It
happened in every war I covered.

"Force," Simone Weil
wrote, "is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does,
as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it
intoxicates."

War perverts and destroys you. It pushes you closer and closer to
your own annihilation -- spiritual, emotional and finally physical. It
destroys the continuity of life, tearing apart all systems -- economic,
social, environmental and political -- that sustain us as human beings. In
war, we deform ourselves, our essence. We give up individual
conscience -- maybe even consciousness -- for contagion of the crowd, the rush
of patriotism, the belief that we must stand together as a nation in
moments of extremity. To make a moral choice, to defy war's enticement,
can in the culture of war be self-destructive. The essence of war is
death. Taste enough of war and you come to believe that the stoics were right: We will, in the end, all consume ourselves in a vast conflagration.

A World War II study determined that, after 60 days of continuous
combat, 98 percent of all surviving soldiers will have become
psychiatric casualties. A common trait among the remaining 2 percent was
a predisposition toward having "aggressive psychopathic personalities."
Lt. Col. Dave Grossman in his book "On Killing: The Psychological Cost
of Learning to Kill in War and Society," notes: "It is not too far from
the mark to observe that there is something about continuous,
inescapable combat which will drive 98 percent of all men insane, and
the other 2 percent were crazy when they go there."

During the war in El Salvador, many soldiers served for three or four
years or longer, as in the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, until
they psychologically or physically collapsed. In garrison towns,
commanders banned the sale of sedatives because those drugs were abused
by the troops. In that war, as in the wars in the Middle East, the
emotionally and psychologically maimed were common. I once interviewed a
19-year-old Salvadoran army sergeant who had spent five years fighting
and then suddenly lost his vision after his unit walked into a rebel
ambush. The rebels killed 11 of his fellow soldiers in the firefight,
including his closest friend. He was unable to see again until he was
placed in an army hospital. "I have these horrible headaches," he told
me as he sat on the edge of his bed. "There is shrapnel in my head. I
keep telling the doctors to take it out." But the doctors told me that
he had no head wounds.

I saw other soldiers in other conflicts go deaf or mute or shake without being able to stop.

War is necrophilia. This necrophilia is central to soldiering just as
it is central to the makeup of suicide bombers and terrorists. The
necrophilia is hidden under platitudes about duty or comradeship. It is
unleashed especially in moments when we seem to have little to live for
and no hope, or in moments when the intoxication of war is at its
highest pitch. When we spend long enough in war, it comes to us as a
kind of release, a fatal and seductive embrace that can consummate the
long flirtation with our own destruction.

In his memoir "Wartime," about the partisan war in Yugoslavia,
Milovan Djilas wrote of the enticement that death held for the
combatants. He stood over the body of his comrade, the commander Sava
Kovacevic, and found:

"...Dying did not seem terrible or unjust. This was the most
extraordinary, the most exalted moment of my life. Death did not seem
strange or undesirable. That I restrained myself from charging blindly
into the fray and death was perhaps due to my sense of obligation to the
troops or to some comrade's reminder concerning the tasks at hand. In
my memory, I returned to those moments many times with the same feeling
of intimacy with death and desire for it while I was in prison,
especially during my first incarceration."

War ascendant wipes out Eros. It wipes out delicacy and tenderness.
Its communal power seeks to render the individual obsolete, to hand all
passions, all choice, all voice to the crowd.

"The most important part of the individual life, which cannot be subsumed in communal life, is love," Sebastian Haffner
wrote in "Defying Hitler." ...

"So comradeship has its special weapons
against love: smut. Every evening in bed, after the last patrol round,
there was the ritual reciting of lewd songs and jokes. That is the hard
and fast rule of male comradeship, and nothing is more mistaken than the
widely held opinion that this is a safety valve for frustrated erotic
or sexual feelings. These songs and jokes do not have an erotic,
arousing effect. On the contrary, they make the act of love appear as
unappetizing as possible. They treat it like digestion and defecation,
and make it an object of ridicule. The men who recited rude songs and
used coarse words for female body parts were in effect denying that they
ever had tender feelings or had been in love, that they had ever made
themselves attractive, behaved gently. ..."

When we see this; when we see our addiction for what it is, when we
understand ourselves and how war has perverted us, life becomes hard to
bear. Jon Steele, a cameraman who spent years in war zones, had a nervous breakdown in a crowded Heathrow Airport after returning from Sarajevo.

Steele had come to understand the reality of his work, a reality
that stripped away the self-righteous, high-octane gloss. When he was in
Sarajevo he was "in a place called Sniper's Alley, and I filmed a girl
there who had been hit in the neck by a sniper's bullet," he wrote. "I
filmed her in the ambulance, and only after she was dead, I suddenly
understood that the last thing she had seen was the reflection of the
lens of the camera I was holding in front of her. This wiped me out. I
grabbed the camera, and started running down Sniper's Alley, filming at
knee level the Bosnians running from place to place."

A year after the end of the war in Sarajevo, I sat with Bosnian
friends who had suffered horribly. A young woman, Ljiljana, had lost her
father, a Serb, who refused to join the besieging Serb forces around
the city. A few days earlier she had to identify his corpse. The body
was lifted, water running out of the sides of a rotting coffin, from a
small park for reburial in the central cemetery. Soon she would emigrate
to Australia -- where, she told me, "I will marry a man who has never
heard of this war and raise children that will be told nothing about it,
nothing about the country I am from."

Ljiljana was young. But the war had exacted a toll. Her cheeks were
hollow, her hair dry and brittle. Her teeth were decayed and some had
broken into jagged bits. She had no money for a dentist; she hoped to
have them fixed in Australia. Yet all she and her friends did that
afternoon was lament the days when they lived in fear and hunger,
emaciated, targeted by Serb gunners on the heights above. They did not
wish back the suffering. And yet, they admitted, those may have been the
fullest days of their lives. They looked at me in despair. I had known
them when hundreds of shells a day fell nearby, when they had no water
to bathe in or wash their clothes, when they huddled in unheated flats
as sniper bullets hit the walls outside.

What they expressed was disillusionment with a sterile, futile and
empty present. Peace had again exposed the void that the rush of war, of
battle, had filled. Once again they were -- as perhaps we all are -- alone,
no longer bound by a common struggle, no longer given the opportunity to
be noble, heroic, no longer sure of what life was about or what it
meant. The old comradeship, however false, had vanished with the last
shot.

Moreover, they had seen that all the sacrifice had been for naught.
They had been, as we all are in war, betrayed. The corrupt old Communist
Party bosses, who became nationalists overnight and got them into the
mess in the first place, had grown rich off their suffering and were
still in power. Ljiljana and the others faced a 70-percent unemployment
rate. They depended on handouts from the international community. They
understood that their cause, once as fashionable in certain intellectual
circles as they were themselves, lay forgotten. No longer did actors,
politicians and artists scramble to visit during the cease-fires -- acts
that were almost always ones of gross self-promotion. They knew the lie
of war, the mockery of their idealism, and struggled with their
shattered illusions. And yet, they wished it all back, and I did, too.

Later, I received a Christmas card. It was signed "Ljiljana from
Australia." It had no return address. I never heard from her again. But
many of those I worked with as war correspondents did not escape. They
could not break free from the dance with death. They wandered from
conflict to conflict, seeking always one more hit.

By then, I was back in Gaza and, at one point, found myself pinned down
in still another ambush. A young Palestinian 15 feet away was fatally
shot through the chest. I had been lured back but now felt none of the
old rush, just fear. It was time to break free, to let go. I knew it was
over for me. I was lucky to get out alive.

Kurt Schork -- brilliant, courageous and driven -- could not let go. He
died in an ambush in Sierra Leone along with another friend of mine,
Miguel Gil Moreno. His entrapment -- his embrace of Thanatos, of the death
instinct -- was never mentioned in the sterile and antiseptic memorial
service held for him in Washington, D.C. Everyone tiptoed around the
issue. But those of us who had known him understood he had been
consumed.

I had worked with Kurt for 10 years, starting in northern Iraq.
Literate, funny -- it seems the brave are often funny. He and I passed
books back and forth in our struggle to make sense of the madness around
us. His loss is a hole that will never be filled. His ashes were placed
in Sarajevo's Lion Cemetery, for the victims of the war. I flew to
Sarajevo and met the British filmmaker Dan Reed. It was an overcast
November day. We stood over the grave and downed a pint of whiskey. Dan
lit a candle. I recited a poem the Roman lyric poet Catullus had written
to honor his dead brother.

"By strangers' costs and waters, many days at sea,
I come here for the rites of your unworlding,
Bringing for you, the dead, these last gifts of the living
And my words -- vain sounds for the man of dust.
Alas, my brother,
You have been taken from me. You have been taken from me,
By cold chance turned a shadow, and my pain.
Here are the foods of the old ceremony, appointed
Long ago for the starvelings under the earth:
Take them: your brother's tears have made them wet: and take
Into eternity my hail and my farewell."

It was there, among 4,000 war dead, that Kurt belonged. He died
because he could not free himself from war. He had been trying to
replicate what he had found in Sarajevo, but he could not. War could
never be new again. Kurt had been in East Timor and Chechnya. Sierra
Leone, I was sure, meant nothing to him.

Kurt and Miguel could not let go. They would have been the first to
admit it. Spend long enough at war, and you cannot fit in anywhere else.
It finally kills you. It is not a new story. It starts out like love,
but it is death.

War is the beautiful young nymph in the fairy tale that, when kissed, exhales the vapors of the underworld.

The ancient Greeks had a word for such a fate: ekpyrosis.

It means to be consumed by a ball of fire. They used it to describe heroes.

Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.